How Film Is Made

a 1958 documentary

Kodak Fac­tory

a flickr set by Richelle

Kodak

Tacita Dean films a factory

DIY Film

ana­log coat­ing goes garage

Sis­ter Ray : near nine­teen min­utes of the Vel­vet Under­ground live in a gymnasium

a shot from a firearm that is aimed and fired quickly

a pho­to­graph that is taken in a short moment of opportunity

a type of shot used in ice hockey

a dis­trib­uted com­puter algo­rithm which copies a self-consistent image of an entire net­work to sta­ble storage

a set of com­puter files and direc­to­ries kept in stor­age as they appeared some time in the past

a sin­gle by Amer­i­can drag per­former RuPaul

the only nuclear reac­tor pow­ered satel­lite launched by the United States

an abbre­vi­a­tion used by US police depart­ment for first inves­ti­ga­tion about a per­son or fugi­tive. It stands for: sex, nation­al­ity, age, per­son­al­ity, skin, height, outer (cloth­ing), tattoos

William Hund­ley

iden­tity theft collages

Craig Cully

real­ism, self-authored nar­ra­tives, and the awk­ward inti­ma­cies of inter-personal relationships

Lau­ren Simonutti

8 rooms, 7 mir­rors, 6 clocks, 2 minds& 199 panes of glass — the clap­per­boards link to video of the artist talk­ing about her work

I’m afraid of power. It makes me ner­vous. In real life, I iden­tify with the vic­tim, that is why I went into art. In my art, I am the mur­derer. I feel for the ordeal of the mur­derer, the man who has to live with his conscience.

The process is to go from pas­sive to active. As an artist I am a pow­er­ful per­son. In real life, I feel like the mouse behind the radiator.

It is mind over mat­ter. You tran­scend real life in your art.

- Louise Bour­geois from Self Expres­sion is Sacred and Fatal

Octo­ber. Here in this dank, unfa­mil­iar kitchen
I study my father’s embar­rassed young man’s face.
Sheep­ish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yel­low perch, in the other
a bot­tle of Carls­berg beer.

In jeans and flan­nel shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose brave and hearty for his pos­ter­ity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.

But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bot­tle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either
and don’t even know the places to fish.

- Ray­mond Carver

mon­day clifton gorge clifton ohio

How did I do it?

I don’t know. All right, I don’t know. I made it. Con­sci­en­tiously, from day to day. This line, that piece of music, one had to enrich it, to hook voices on either side of it, define its bound­aries. There were so many voices. I had to choose. Every­one talked about her, wanted her. Anna-Marie Guardi. And about him. I had to choose among the voices. It wasn’t pos­si­ble to rep­re­sent or use them all. The recep­tion was enor­mous at first. Then the num­bers dimin­ished. Peo­ple spoke less. And when less was said, the park stood out more. Alleys were formed, dark, always dark toward the ten­nis courts and toward the gray build­ings, the offices of the French Embassy. On the one side, the Ganges car­ried along the yel­low earth of the rice pad­dies. Day and night. It was abom­inably hot in Paris in August. It was in August. I was pre­oc­cu­pied with ques­tions of money. Hounded even as I worked. I have been mak­ing films with­out a salary since 1969. I am going to talk about this film. Don’t be impa­tient, let me get rid of my annoy­ance, purify myself of wasted words. So I hated money, and the world. And the heat. And myself for being so stu­pid, for hav­ing always been that way, yes. Don’t inter­rupt. I hated. This film that no one would see. No one sees my films. Why make them? Voices tor­ment me. Another voice speaks to me when I wake up, say­ing, get out of here, get out of France, drop the whole thing. The voices waited to be heard. I no longer expected any­thing. At this point, I begin to come out of it, to see myself fac­ing the film. I am doing it. Yes, fac­ing the film. I am doing it. Each day, from morn­ing until night. For three months.

- Mar­guerite Duras

Duras as Philoso­pher : a lec­ture by Mar­cus Steinweg

The Plea­sure of Flinching

“In the viral video realm, ama­teur Iraq war footage ranks just behind pornog­ra­phy, celebri­ties’ drunken exploits, and shark attacks. Do these videos rep­re­sent what Son­tag called our “right to view,” or are they a porn medium made from left­overs of a world film­ing its self-destruction?”

read­ings from Oper­a­tion Home­com­ing at Hear­ing Voices and NPR

sol­diers read their sto­ries, let­ters and poems

Navvy : a song by Pere Ubu

bonus video: David Thomas explains Pere Ubu is like a cup

Clarence John Laugh­lin orga­nizes a life’s work — an excerpt:

GROUP A: STILL LIFES
This group, the ear­li­est on which I worked, was begun in 1935. I started with no for­mal train­ing at all as a painter or pho­tog­ra­pher, but with some back­ground as a writer, and a vast back­ground as a reader. Although this group orig­i­nated in a desire to develop fur­ther an inter­est in com­po­si­tion (incited by the dis­cov­ery of cer­tain art mag­a­zines in the 1930s) it even­tu­ally became involved in an urge to see how far my feel­ings about objects could become pro­jected through the cam­era; and in the dis­cov­ery of objects which could become the clues to changes in the nature of Amer­i­can cul­ture. Thus, here, as in much of my work, there is a pro­gres­sion from the semi-abstract to the poetic.

GROUP J: THE IMAGES OF THE LOST
Group J deals with the peo­ple rejected by our soci­ety; it is the first group pri­mar­ily devoted to human beings. But the peo­ple were very sel­dom pho­tographed where they were actu­ally found. Instead, a dif­fi­cult method was used: a spe­cial back­ground was selected for each per­son (often from places dis­cov­ered pre­vi­ously) with the inten­tion of mak­ing the back­ground work, not only in terms of design, but in terms of a sub­tle rev­e­la­tion of the over­all social sit­u­a­tion of the per­son. The peo­ple them­selves were not used as mod­els — they were not posed — nor were they used as “soci­o­log­i­cal doc­u­ments.” The attempt was to treat them as indi­vid­ual human beings. The over­all com­po­si­tion was deter­mined care­fully on the ground glass. But the expo­sure was not made till each per­son seemed to reveal him­self by some spon­ta­neous ges­ture or expression.

GROUP Q: NEW ANATOMIES
In this com­par­a­tively small group, which began in 1951, I have tried to show that the cam­era can explore the plas­tic poten­tial­i­ties of the human body in just as real a sense as, for instance, Picasso has done in some mar­velous draw­ings where he makes use of numer­ous kinds of dis­tor­tion in recre­at­ing the body; although in these pho­tos dis­tor­tion is not the method actu­ally used. Nev­er­the­less we are pre­sented with visions of the body which it would be impos­si­ble for the phys­i­cal eye directly to see. The pic­tures go com­pletely beyond the kind of “record­ing” func­tion usu­ally assigned to the cam­era, and instead of giv­ing us the results of direct vision, give us far more — the hyper-real vision cre­ated by the inner eye in man — the poetic, desir­ing, and dream­ing eye. Because of this, the erotic ele­ment becomes all the more intense. But due to the puri­tan­i­cal code dom­i­nat­ing this coun­try till recently, none of these pic­tures have ever been pub­lished or exhib­ited before. The basic quo­ta­tion for this series is from Hart Crane: “New thresh­olds, new anatomies!” And the last half of this quo­ta­tion is, lit­er­ally, the sub­ject for this group.

GROUP S: THE MAGIC OF THE OBJECT
It should be pointed out that Group S is the only one of the many groups I worked on which is entirely devoted to so-called com­mon­place objects. In this group I try to show how the pho­tog­ra­pher, like the painter and poet, can release a level of mean­ing from the most ordi­nary objects, which has noth­ing to do with their nat­u­ral­is­tic mean­ing. The pho­tog­ra­pher, of course, does this through intensely per­sonal vision (just as is true of the painter and the poet) and when this hap­pens, what the pho­tog­ra­pher is really deal­ing with is what the human mind has pro­jected into the object: the secret lan­guage of inan­i­mate objects, the hid­den images of man’s hopes and joys, his dreams and desires, by which he makes more human the inhu­man world around him. Although most of these pic­tures use the “found” object, all the objects are, in a deeper sense, “well arranged,” that is, light­ing, com­po­si­tion, and other fac­tors have been used, both con­sciously and com­pul­sively, to make more man­i­fest the hid­den mean­ings these objects have for the sen­si­bil­ity of the pho­tog­ra­pher. But, aside from all this, many of the objects in these pic­tures can be truly, con­sid­ered part of the iconog­ra­phy of our time.

to read the rest … 

Unknow­ing: The Work of Mod­ernist Fic­tion : Philip Weinstein

When and why does west­ern fic­tion become dif­fi­cult to read? My lec­ture takes on this ques­tion,” Wein­stein says. “Mod­ernist writ­ers of unknow­ing refuse to tell the West’s favorite story: that of a hero or hero­ine mov­ing through trou­ble and even­tu­ally com­ing to know. I explore how we in the West came to tell that favorite story, why we have cycled and recy­cled it for over two cen­turies. Then, around the turn of the last cen­tury, a group of thinkers and writers-Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, and Freud among them-worked to reshape our very sense of the human drama. They revised our most com­mon­sen­si­cal ways of under­stand­ing our­selves in space and time and among oth­ers. The aim of the lec­ture is to explain why they are so dif­fi­cult to read. No less impor­tant, I’ll try to per­suade my audi­ence that their dif­fi­culty is invaluable.”

i want a pho­to­graph, i said, a pho­to­graph of you.

pho­to­graph just thing, she said, have no meaning.

My mother was scared of peo­ple in office — civil ser­vants, income tax inspec­tors, cus­toms men, bailiffs, cus­toms offi­cers, any­one whose job it was to enforce the law. She always felt in the wrong — the typ­i­cal, incur­able atti­tude of the poor. She never entirely got over it. But I did, through oral exams. Every time I passed one I felt I’d made some progress against the poverty endemic to our fam­ily. A way with words. It was like a phys­i­cal con­fronta­tion between me and soci­ety, there to try and destroy me. Singers and actors must go through the same expe­ri­ence with the audi­ence. The peo­ple who pay to hear you sing or speak are ene­mies you have to get the bet­ter of in order to sur­vive. But when you’ve done it once, after you’ve mas­tered the words and car­ried the audi­ence with you, it hap­pens to you all the time. You pre­tend it’s up to you not to dis­s­ap­point the peo­ple who’ve gone to the trou­ble of com­ing to hear you. But there’s more to it than that. Some­thing that verges on want­ing to kill the per­son who’s come to sit in judge­ment of you.

- Mar­guerite Duras from Prac­ti­cal­i­ties

In peri­ods of social cri­sis, pho­tog­ra­phy as art can seem an inhu­man escape. It is so often appar­ently dis­tant from the spe­cific cat­a­stro­phes in the day’s news. Think of Stieglitz mak­ing, dur­ing the worst years of the Depres­sion, his coldly beau­ti­ful views of New York City from the heights of the Sher­a­ton Hotel — or of Ansel Adams pho­tograph­ing in the Sier­ras as the worst of World War II was being fought in Europe.

In response to jux­ta­po­si­tions like these there are crit­ics who have asked for “con­cerned pho­tog­ra­phy,” by which they mean pho­tog­ra­phy that deals directly with social ills. Few pho­tog­ra­phers them­selves have, how­ever, sup­ported the use of the adjec­tive “con­cerned” as a way of dis­tin­guish­ing one artist from another; they know first­hand that all art is the prod­uct of con­cern. They believe as a con­se­quence that it has social util­ity — it is designed to give us courage. Soci­ety is endan­gered to the extent that any of us loses faith in mean­ing, in con­se­quence. Art that can con­vinc­ingly speak through form for sig­nif­i­cance bears upon the prob­lem of nihilism and is socially con­struc­tive. Restated, pho­tog­ra­phy as art does address evil, but it does so broadly as it works to con­vince us of life’s value; the dark­ness that art com­bats is the ulti­mate one, the con­clu­sion that life is with­out worth and finally bet­ter off ended. Which is to say that art addresses an inner strug­gle whereas jour­nal­ism more often reports on the out­ward con­se­quences of it. Per­haps this is what William Car­los Williams meant when he wrote that “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die mis­er­ably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” We have all had the sad oppor­tu­nity to watch that. And though poems and pic­tures can­not by them­selves save any­one — only peo­ple who care for each other face to face have a chance to do that — they can strengthen our resolve to agree to life.

- Robert Adams, from Pho­tograph­ing Evil col­lected In Defense of Tra­di­tional Val­ues

America’s Future

appro­pri­ately, atten­tively, con­ser­v­a­tively, affa­bly, net­work­ably, chablis

Lady­boy Roxina

obses­sive, per­sis­tent, iter­a­tive, trans­mu­ta­tive, banal, per­sonal, public

Oki­nawa Soba

another time, some other place

Least Wanted

state sanc­tioned portraiture

Polar bears live on the ice floes and feed on seals. They can be shot with­out much trou­ble but it takes a bul­let in the heart or brain to kill them. Polar bear liver is poi­so­nous and should not be eaten.

Seals are hard to approach but every effort should be made to get them for they pro­vide the best meat. In spring seals come up to bask on the ice beside their breath­ing holes. They sleep rest­lessly, rais­ing their heads about every 30 sec­onds to look around for their enemy, the polar bear. In approach­ing the seal, the Eskimo hunter crawls for­ward cau­tiously while the seal is sleep­ing, being care­ful to keep down­wind of it. When the seal moves the hunter stops and imi­tates its move­ments, lying flat on the ice, rais­ing his head up and down and wrig­gling his body slightly. In order to look as much like a seal as pos­si­ble the hunter approaches the seal side­ways instead of head on and keeps his arms close to his body. Since the seal is lying on smooth ice and usu­ally at an incline near the edge of the breath­ing hole, it must be killed instantly by a shot through the brain, for with the least move­ment of its body it will slide into the water. There­fore, it should be shot through the head at close range, 25 to 50 yards, so that the hunter can dash up and seize it before it reaches the water and sinks.

Seals can also be shot in open water, and in win­ter they will usu­ally float, but the prob­lem is to retrieve them. To accom­plish this the Eski­mos use a seal hook, a short wooden club or ball about the size of a grape­fruit, with four sharp upcurved iron hooks at the cen­ter. This is attached to a long line and is thrown over the seal which is hooked and pulled in. The wooden grap­ple described in the sec­tion on mak­ing your own fish­ing kit (p. 11) would serve this pur­pose if it were heavy enough and the barbs sharp and strong enough to pen­e­trate the seal’s hide.

Wal­ruses are found on mov­ing ice floes or at leads not far from shore where they can feed on clams. They should be shot through the neck, just below the head.

- from Sur­vival on Land and Sea, Office of Naval Intel­li­gence, The United States Navy, 1943 

The Will to Death : a song by John Frusciante

“Barthes is often mis­quoted, erro­neously by the way, as hav­ing stated that from one to as much as four per­cent of the weight of the world’s mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions are pho­tographs. An absurd num­ber, for what is a pho­to­graph — a slip of paper, an amal­ga­ma­tion of pix­els — when com­pared to a coat, a horse, a house, or a gun. Yet prac­ti­cally this cal­cu­la­tion is far too mod­est a model, for they hold down our walls, stiffen our wal­lets, and fat­ten our resolve, never mind all those pho­tographs we’ve born before and can con­jure now, stark and embell­ished, by our machi­na­tions. The stag­ger­ing toil of aug­men­ta­tion is mer­ci­less. This per­sis­tent enti­tle­ment to abduct time and appro­pri­ate like­ness serves best to con­dense our dreams, com­pound our mem­o­ries, and sen­ti­men­tal­ize fears. Trapped in this way, por­ten­tous and latent, aleator­i­cal and dis­crim­i­nate, muti­nous and inim­i­cal, light will lie, always in wait. It’s not the see­ing that we care so very much about, but the beings seen and the grav­ity of being seen again.”

Dance with Camera

Maya Deren

Elec­tric Earth

Doug Aitken

Doll Clothes

Cindy Sher­man

To retain its per­fect fresh­ness, keep THE HEART dry. UNLIKE sim­i­lar prod­ucts, THE HEART WILL EXPAND WHILE DRYING OUT. All actions per­formed with THE HEART are there­fore definitive.

PREPARATION OF SENTIMENTS: To one mea­sure of delir­ium, add 2½ mea­sures of HEART. Stir until a sen­ti­men­tal solu­tion forms. Allow to stand for one night. While you sleep, the sen­ti­ment will take on the desired con­sis­tency (creamy, oily or mal­leable). Do not pre­pare more HEART than you can use imme­di­ately, since even in a short space of time it tends to cling.

IMPORTANT: THE HEART acts like a cement, so delir­ium must never be added to pre­vi­ously pre­pared sen­ti­ment, nor should it be ‘dwelt on’ too long. THE HEART hard­ens in two hours. Increase the dosage of HEART in the first few sec­onds if you desire a sen­ti­ment with a firmer consistency.

THE HEART casts a self-satisfied glow over gen­er­ous and kind individuals.

When applied to meaner per­son­al­i­ties how­ever (espe­cially if allowed to pen­e­trate the whole being) it tends to be dis­si­pated through­out the pores and becomes totally transparent.

- Jean-Claude Silbermann 

Vis­i­ble Light

self-revelation and tran­scen­dence as told in the sto­ries of four not so famous pho­tog­ra­phers, chron­i­cling the form of their pur­suit, and the mean­ings they find. few peo­ple write as symp­to­mati­cally and sym­pa­thet­i­cally of the uses of pho­tog­ra­phy as well as Michael Lesy.

The Cam­era Viewed Vol­ume II: Writ­ings on Twentieth-Century Photography

words by artists, crit­ics, his­to­ri­ans, and the­o­rists; con­tains Jerry Uels­mann on post-visualisation, Fred­er­ick Sommer’s Extem­po­ra­ne­ous Talk at the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, Duane Michals’ con­ver­sa­tion with stu­dents, an inter­view with Garry Wino­grand, Martha Rosler on Lee Fried­lan­der, Max Kazloff on the Uncanny Por­trait, as well as essays by Barthes, Son­tag, Kra­cauer, Bazin, and Arnheim. 

Jay Bennett’s final album, acoustic songs of love and regret, is a free down­load. you won’t regret it; one of those records that you’ll love with repeated lis­ten­ing. read a review.

a song : With­out the Ben­e­fit of Sight

By mix­ing vary­ing parts of a low con­trast metol for­mu­la­tion with an ener­getic hydro­quinone solu­tion, a work­ing devel­oper of flex­i­ble con­trast and sur­pris­ing util­ity can be crafted. When used in com­bi­na­tion with multi-contrast paper a fine degree of con­trast con­trol is pos­si­ble. Refer to the table below for mix­ing ratios. Typ­i­cal devel­op­ment time is about 3 minutes.

Dr Beer’s is also agree­able in a two bath work flow by mix­ing one tray of low con­trast work­ing strength devel­oper and a sec­ond tray of high con­trast; the effect of whichever bath is used first will pre­dom­i­nate and the amount of time the print remains in either bath will by course impact the final print. Exper­i­men­ta­tion is the watchword.

Mix chem­i­cals in order given; begin Part A with a pinch of the sodium sul­fite to min­i­mize oxi­da­tion of the metol.

Devel­oper Stock Solu­tion : Part A
750 ml water (125 degrees F)
8 gr metol
23 gr sodium sul­fite (anhy­drous)
20 gr potas­sium car­bon­ate (anhy­drous)
1.1 potas­sium bro­mide
+ water to make 1000 ml

Devel­oper Stock Solu­tion : Part B
750 ml water (125 degrees F)
23 gr sodium sul­fite (anhy­drous)
27 gr potas­sium car­bon­ate (anhy­drous)
8 gr hyr­dro­qui­nine
2.2 gr potas­sium bro­mide
+ water to make 1000 ml

* There’s no con­nec­tion between Beer’s num­ber and paper con­trast num­ber; the dif­fer­ence between the low­est con­trast for­mu­la­tion and the high­est is about 3/4 to 1 grade. First select the grade of paper or con­trast fil­ter that best matches your desired result and then uti­lize Dr Beer’s to zero in the quality.

Chance (Atmos­phere) : Joy Divi­sion : an early ver­sion for the radio

try­ing to get back, right where i was

I renounce the blind­ness of the mag­a­zines.
I want to lie down under a tree.
This is the only duty that is not death.
This is the ever­last­ing hap­pi­ness
Of small winds.
Sud­denly,
A pheas­ant flut­ters, and I turn
Only to see him van­ish­ing at the damp edge
Of the road.

- James Wright

one fold origami

you can actu­ally do a lot

mend­ing for the people

Michael Swaine

Night Light : by Sleater-Kinney

Oh lit­tle light
That shines for me in the dark of night
Oh lit­tle sigh
Some­times I fol­low you all the way home
I would almost have to ask you
I hate to be led
So give me a spark I can look for instead

How do you do it
This bit­ter and bloody world
Keep it together and shine for your fam­ily
How do you do it
With visions of worst to come
Live in the present
And spin off the rays of sun

Oh lit­tle beam
Split­ting the fog and the dirt in between
Oh sim­plify
Like a prob­lem you try to work out in your mind
I would almost have to ask you
It’s clumsy when said
So give me a spark I can look for instead 

Cel­e­brat­ing the Life and Work [pdf] : Five Dials mag­a­zine issue no. 10

the known universe

pow­ers of 10

time was the pho­tographs were my prob­lem. the tak­ing fine: see­ing the thing, cam­era eye framed and squeez­ing the shut­ter blind a moment and past reflected light impact­ing sil­ver. it was all that came after — slips of paper, bro­mides clumped and crum­pled in gelatin — evi­dence float­ing the gap between what i wanted and the pith i got. tak­ing pic­tures wasn’t my prob­lem, it was the con­duct of the prod­uct that tipped my hand; i pre­ferred it latent.

if fail­ure is inevitable with devel­op­ment, then a cal­cu­lated cul­ti­va­tion of sus­pen­sion i’d make my intent. it’s not uncom­mon to scrab­ble notes about expo­sure set­tings or light con­di­tions for future ref­er­ence and i thought to do the same; nar­rate the act, describe the con­di­tions of the transaction:

jess, kate and black­berry bushes we found after pick­ing full hat full, fore­arms thorn scratched, fin­gers blue black. will bake pie if not sun tired.

last shot of grandma before leav­ing the hos­pi­tal. doesn’t have much nice to say.

trail along the outer rim. cool air, mon­soon clouds form­ing north.

kitty bird and her boyfriend [?] in the back of dale’s truck.

those plas­tic smok­ing chairs out around behind work.

etc., etc.

at the end of a roll i’d fold up the litany, rub­ber band it to the can­is­ter, and toss it in a box with all the oth­ers. i’d make pho­tog­ra­phy all a motion: end­less and deferred, eter­nally inferred. just like how i remem­bered. make the pic­tures, not matter.

All Smiles and Mari­achi : a song by Lambchop

When they were intro­duced, he made a wit­ti­cism, hop­ing to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hop­ing to be liked. Then each drove home alone, star­ing straight ahead, with the very same twist on their faces.

The man who’d intro­duced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anx­ious as he was to pre­serve good rela­tions at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

- David Fos­ter Wal­lace, from Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men

Wal­lace Shawn reads from his new book

the role of the artist in the priv­i­leged world

In Memo­riam: Sweet, Sad Rocker Vic Chesnutt

friends recall the life of the great songwriter

“how are things going?”

Mitsu Hadeishi on the (non)(e)valuation of now

a sequence from win­ter 2007 : trace lines of snow on a frozen pond

It is all one to me whether or not the typ­i­cal west­ern sci­en­tist under­stands or appre­ci­ates my work, since he will not in any case under­stand the spirit in which I write. Our civ­i­liza­tion is char­ac­terised by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than mak­ing progress one of its fea­tures. Typ­i­cally it con­structs. It is occu­pied with build­ing an ever more com­pli­cated struc­ture. And even clar­ity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. For me on the con­trary clar­ity, per­spicu­ity are valu­able in themselves.

I am not inter­ested in con­struct­ing a build­ing, so much as in hav­ing a per­spic­u­ous view of the foun­da­tion of pos­si­ble buildings.

- Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, from an unpub­lished for­ward to Philo­soph­i­cal Remarks

for Zuki, who took me every day a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, thank you.

two amaz­ing sites doc­u­ment­ing life beyond the norm; be sure to dig into the archives.

1000 Words : pic­tures telling stories

fol­low Anna, an acro­bat and art edu­ca­tor, on her incred­i­ble bike jour­ney from Alaska to so far Mex­ico and even­tu­ally Panama

Bastish

two years ago Kevin and Tomoe moved from the hus­tle of Tokyo to a much dif­fer­ent life in a small vil­lage in the moun­tains. they grow rice, care for chick­ens, and are about to have a baby. they also lead bik­ing and hik­ing tours of the Japan­ese countryside.

Cow­ard

live record­ing

Super­nat­ural

le cargo video

Songs of Sur­vival and Reflection

a recent inter­view with Terry Gross

Live from the Moun­tain Stage

from June 2009

Tiny Desk Concert

live July 2008

Assist

they shoot music don’t they

That period helped my mother to come out of her shell and become inde­pen­dent. She acquired a pres­ence and lost her fear of human con­tact: her hat awry, because a young fel­low was press­ing his head against hers, while she merely laughed into the cam­era with an expres­sion of self-satisfaction. (The fic­tion that pho­tographs can “tell us” any­thing — but isn’t all for­mu­la­tion, even of things that have really hap­pened, more or less a fic­tion? Less, if we con­tent our­selves with a mere record of events; more, if we try to for­mu­late in depth? And the more fic­tion we put into a nar­ra­tive, the more likely it is to inter­est oth­ers, because peo­ple iden­tify more read­ily with for­mu­la­tions than with recorded facts. Does this explain the need for poetry? “Breath­less on the river­bank” is one of Thomas Bernhard’s for­mu­la­tions.)
 
- Peter Handke, from A Sor­row Beyond Dreams

Minchin’s 12/15

a print devel­oper cross­ing the low con­trast of Ansco 120 with the rich­ness of glycin

Erlick Plain Fix

a low odor, eco­nom­i­cal fix for­mu­lated by strip­ping F6 down to the basics

Soe­marko LC-1

low con­trast devel­oper for mak­ing con­tin­u­ous tone images from lith film

GSD-10

a glycin only film devel­oper for stand development

oh baby, All Through the Night : a song by Lewis Allen Reed

Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, bap­tized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, win­ter, spring,
sum­mer. Leaves over­head, under­foot.
Waves arrive, buf­fets from friends
offended, ene­mies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.

- William Stafford

Adobe Light­room Pod­cast #22

mas­ter print­ers Richard Ben­son and Thomas Palmer talk about the process of pho­to­graphic off­set lith­o­graphs, par­tic­u­larly the mak­ing of their renowned project Pho­tographs from the Col­lec­tion of the Gilman Paper Company

Adobe Light­room Pod­cast #23

Richard Ben­son and Jay Maisel dis­cuss Benson’s unique and aston­ish­ing ink jet print­ing process, involv­ing mul­ti­ple passes, slowly build­ing up the image with lay­ers of pig­ment. They also talk about the moti­va­tions, strate­gies and goals of pho­to­graphic work.

and an interview

Richard Ben­son in con­ver­sa­tion with John Paul Caponigro

 
/ there are no final prints

/ an arm, a leg, maybe a spleen; but always a corpse of work

/ your audi­ence is, will be, and always were other photographers

/ expe­ri­enc­ing time for­ward doesn’t make the new nec­es­sar­ily better

/ medi­a­tions on qual­ity are opin­ion, fash­ion, trend, bless­ing, canonization

/ it’s quo­ta­tions all the way down

sun­day bloedel reserve bain­bridge island washington

Tokyo Blues

the city by way of the ubiq­ui­tous com­mon blue PVC plas­tic con­struc­tion tarp : a new book of pho­tographs by Nurri Kim

pal­lalink

pho­tographs and more by the col­lec­tive of Kawa­hara, Higash­ionji and Nishikawa

Your Golden Oppor­tu­nity Is Come­ing Very Soon

typol­ogy push­ing at a way out : pho­tographs by RJ Shaugnessy

In the Garden

lay­ered pho­to­graphic com­po­si­tions by Joel Leivick

Bertrand Fleuret*

expres­sion­is­tic pho­tographs and books

Motel Blues, a Loudon Wain­right song, cov­ered by Alex Chilton 

Aaron Siskind
Harry Calla­han
Edmund Teske
Fred­er­ick Som­mer
Ralph Eugene Meat­yard
Clarence John Laugh­lin
col­lect­ing photographs

For two and half years I worked as a mas­ter printer at a pho­tog­ra­phy lab in Chicago that spe­cial­ized in meet­ing the evi­den­tial and illus­tra­tive needs of lawyers, insur­ance agen­cies, and law enforce­ment — which is a fancy way of say­ing pic­tures of dead peo­ple. Ten to twelve hours a day, five days a week, I cus­tom printed, one by one, 80,000 unique neg­a­tives, both color and black and white, from snap­shot to poster size murals, doc­u­ment­ing in detail the unfor­tu­nate and tragic occur­rences of mod­ern life. I learned three things: never get in a car, stay away from trains, and never lean against any­thing. Cars crash, trains are called rolling stock because they don’t stop, and every sin­gle rail­ing, balustrade and fence will even­tu­ally give way with grim results. It’s prob­a­bly also a good idea to avoid work­ing in a factory.

[con­tinue… ]

ali­son / liv­ing a lit­tle, laugh­ing a lit­tle / tracks of my tears / tears of a clown / no more tear stained make-up / clown­time is over : Elvis Costello & Steve Nieve, live at The Sup­per Club, New York, 1996

Light as it falls from the sun onto our ran­dom world defines every­thing per­cep­ti­ble to the eye by con­stant acci­dent, relent­lessly chang­ing. A splen­did spot of light on a fence is gone in a mat­ter of sec­onds. A tone of light is frailer in essence than a whiff of roses. I have watched Gene all of a day wan­der­ing around the ruined White­hall pho­tograph­ing as dili­gently as if he were a news­reel cam­era­man in bat­tle. The old house was as quiet and still as eter­nity itself; to Gene it was ephemeral in its shift of light and shade as a fit­ful moth.

He devel­oped his film only once a year; he didn’t want to be tyr­an­nized by impa­tience, and I sus­pect he didn’t like being cooped up in the dark­room. He was a lens grinder by pro­fes­sion, which meant he was short of free time. His evenings were apt to be taken up with teach­ing, lec­tur­ing, arrang­ing shows, and he longed to read more and more. There were books in his auto­mo­bile, by his equip­ment in his office. He had more hob­bies than could be kept up with, espe­cially those that involved his fam­ily: hik­ing, cook­ing, col­lect­ing the poetic trash that served as props for his pic­tures. One could usu­ally find the Meat­yards up to some­thing rich and strange: mak­ing vio­let jam (or some other suf­fi­ciently unlikely fla­vor), model ships, fan­ci­ful book cov­ers; lis­ten­ing to a superb col­lec­tion of antique jazz, or to record­ings which Gene seemed to dream up and then com­mand the exis­tence of, like the Andrews Sis­ters singing Poe’s “Raven” (“Ulalume” on the flip side, both in close har­mony). He had a record­ing of the wed­ding of Sis­ter Rosetta Tharpe. He had a loose-leaf note­book of thou­sands of grotesque and absurd names. He was a liv­ing ency­clo­pe­dia of bizarre acci­dents and Ken­tucky locu­tions. One evening he turned up to tell with delight of hear­ing and old man say of the mov­ing pic­tures these days that by God you can see the actor’ genitrotties.

- Guy Dav­en­port, Rem­i­nis­cence, from Ralph Eugene Meat­yard

Matthew Cook

serv­ing in the Ter­ri­to­r­ial Army, paint­ings from Afghanistan

Michael D. Fay

blog entries by US Marine com­bat artist in Iraq [start at the bottom]

Grif­fith Baily Coale

WWII US Navy com­bat artist

1. Don’t pre­tend lunacy. Your sur­geon will detect such decep­tion, and you are sure to be court-martial. Or if you suc­ceed as a lunatic, you will be invalided home, with­out any more chance to rejoin your com­rades at the front.

2. Don’t spit freely. If you do, you will be obsessed with the habit of spit­ting. And remem­ber, it is an early symp­tom of neurosis.

3. Don’t prac­tise sleep­ing in a fixed pos­ture. This is also one of the symp­toms of neu­ro­sis. It is con­ta­gious to your comrades-in-arms.

5. Don’t be ner­vous as to feel your heart­beat from time to time. Such a symp­tom always appears in the early stages of lunacy.

6. Don’t worry about the color of your urine or excre­ment. This is an early symp­tom of lunacy.

7. One week’s prac­tise is enough to feign nat­u­rally the tremor of your hands, shoul­ders, and legs. The tremor of the head, espe­cially, is the most con­spic­u­ous sign of neurosis.

8. If you prac­tise to quickly roll your eye­balls hor­i­zon­tally with­out mov­ing your head, it will soon become habit­ual. This par­tic­u­lar move­ment of the eye­balls pre­ludes seri­ous neu­ro­sis. Even with­out prac­tice, your eye­balls will soon begin to tremor unwit­tingly if you con­stantly worry about it.

9. Don’t fall into the habit of glanc­ing side­ways at your comrades-in-arms. Your sur­geon dis­likes such a habit, as it pre­dicts the approach­ing men­ace of neurosis.

10. Don’t eat your own excre­ment or drink your own urine in the pres­ence of oth­ers. If you do, you are sure to be branded a lunatic, how­ever warmly you may protest.

11. Don’t mum­ble the same words imme­di­ately after you have spo­ken them. If you prac­tise it repeat­edly, your surgeon’s ver­dict will inevitably be neurosis.

12. Don’t try to develop your imag­i­na­tive pow­ers to the extent that all human faces look like ani­mals’. Or you are likely to see no more human faces even on your friends.

13. Don’t imi­tate an epilep­tic fit. If you prac­tise it for three days, you will cer­tainly have a real one. Then you are on your way to lunacy.

- PSYOPS pamphlet 

Fried­lan­der won’t admit an influ­ence, offer­ing a good pot of beans as inspi­ra­tion enough and my father always said you weren’t really poor until you drank off the soup and cooked the beans again. make these every few weeks.

rinse two pounds of white beans, great north­ern or navy don’t mat­ter, and soak in water overnight. in the morn­ing drain the beans and put them in a large stock­pot along with a big diced sweet onion — walla walla if you can get it, a clove minced gar­lic, 2 bay leaves, and two pounds meaty smoked ham hocks. fill the pot with water a few inches above the beans and tie together a good hand­ful of pars­ley and as many sprigs of thyme as you can find and set in on top. bring the pot to boil on high heat and care­fully skim off any foam or scum that forms up on the sur­face. then turn the heat down low and half-way cover with a lid. sim­mer the soup slow for two or three hours — you want just the per­cep­tion of bub­bling — and from time to time skim off any more scum that might rise to the sur­face. once the beans are cooked remove what­ever is left of the tied up herbs. chop a few car­rots and stalks of cel­ery, stir them into the soup with salt and pep­per to taste, and sim­mer until the veg­eta­bles are just start­ing to soften, about 20 min­utes. then with a slot­ted spoon dredge out the hocks to a cut­ting board, let them cool to touch, pull out the ham meat from the fat and bone break­ing it up with your hands, and then stir that back into the pot. best to wait a day or two to eat to let the beans marry. invite some friends over. fine with toasted bread and baked squash. freezes well.

Ask me, if you like, to choose what I con­sider the ten best pho­tographs I have pro­duced until now, and here is my reply:

1. An acci­den­tal snap­shot of a shadow between two other care­fully posed pic­tures of a girl in a bathing suit.

2. A close-up of an ant colony trans­ported to the lab­o­ra­tory, and illu­mi­nated by a flash.

3. A twi­light pic­ture of the Empire State Build­ing com­pletely emp­tied of its tenants.

4. A girl in neg­ligee attire, call­ing for help or merely attract­ing attention.

5. A black and white print obtained by plac­ing a fun­nel into the tray of devel­op­ing liq­uid, and turn­ing the light onto the sub­merged paper.

6. A dying leaf, its curled end des­per­ately claw­ing the air.

7. A close-up of an eye with the lashes well made up, a glass tear rest­ing on the cheek.

8. Frozen fire­works on the night of a 14th of July in Paris.

9. Pho­to­graph of a paint­ing called, “The rope dancer accom­pa­nies her­self with her shad­ows. Man Ray 1916.”

10. Pho­to­graph of a bro­ken chair car­ried home from Grif­fith Park, Hol­ly­wood, at one of its bro­ken legs the slip­pers of Anna Pavlova.

Do you doubt my sin­cer­ity? Really, if you imag­ine that I value your opin­ion enough to waste two min­utes of my pre­cious time try­ing to con­vince you, you are entirely mistaken.

— man ray, from the essay Pho­tog­ra­phy Is Not Art, 1943

Feeder

pho­tographs by Nurri Kim

The Album Project

pho­tographs by Charles Mintz

Mid­way: Mes­sage from the Gyre

pho­tographs by Chris Jordan

 
Annette Pehrs­son
 

Have a look. I had the plea­sure of curat­ing from amongst the best to be found on Flickr the La Pura Vida Gallery show for Sep­tem­ber: Drift­ing in Deep Waters

Thanks to Bryan Formhals for orga­niz­ing the pro­ceed­ings and to every­one who sub­mit­ted pho­tographs; con­grat­u­la­tions to those who made the final edit. 

Love is not a feel­ing. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: “That was not true pain, or it would not have gone off so quickly”.

- Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, from Zettel

His process, meth­ods and equip­ment had all been pared down to the barest essen­tials, and the activ­i­ties of daily liv­ing had under­gone a sim­i­lar treat­ment. Edward’s guid­ing prin­ci­ples in both areas were sim­ple and log­i­cal: Does it give me more time to pho­to­graph? More money for film? More stor­age space? Less time in the dark­room? He had a pol­icy of not mak­ing dupli­cate neg­a­tives, which qual­i­fied on all four counts, and was fur­ther rein­forced by his firm belief that a good pho­tog­ra­pher, work­ing with a large cam­era, should be suf­fi­ciently sure of what he was doing to make the right expo­sure the first time.

- Charis Wil­son, from The Weston Eye, found in EW 100: Cen­ten­nial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston

Cari­bou : Frank Black
demo recorded march 1987

Vol 2, No 2: Jour­nal of Sur­re­al­ism and the Americas

Spe­cial Issue on Pho­tog­ra­phy: pdf arti­cles on Tim­o­thy O’Sullivan, Fred­er­ick Som­mer, Clarence John Laugh­lin, Francesca Wood­man [you gotta reg­is­ter to access the articles] 

George East­man House’s Image Mag­a­zine, 1952–1997 are avail­able online

his­tor­i­cal, tech­ni­cal and art related arti­cles; table of con­tents are brows­able, issues are searchable

But: First spec­u­late, then exper­i­ment! And I spec­u­lated as fol­lows: Com­ing from the next room, the sound from an instru­ment touches my ear more force­fully if the door is open, than if it is closed. Anal­ogy: The light ought to work more directly in the cam­era, if it doesn’t have to pass through a solid medium, such as glass.

This was true and false at the same time; because sound is more eas­ily trans­mit­ted in solid bod­ies than in the air. And yet, when I open the door, I can hear better!

And I do see clearer through glass lenses than through the air! — Here I stopped, amazed at the change­abil­ity of the unchange­able laws of nature, their capri­cious­ness, their self-contradictions, and their loose­ness. But I then con­tin­ued. Took away the lens from the cam­era, and inserted a diaphragm, drilled through with a sewing nee­dle. I pho­tographed a per­son, and received a result which in all aspects was more suc­cess­ful than in pho­tograph­ing with a good lens.

Against all rules I had placed the man against a win­dow — behind which was a land­scape with fir trees in the fore­ground, and lakes and forests in the background.

Then man appeared in clear detail; and so did the trees, in per­spec­tive all the way out to the distance.

Test with a lens and the same pose. The man now appeared flat, no detail, and the trees not a trace — the whole land­scape only a bright white background.

But my diaphragm gave me yet another advan­tage. The man’s coat was white with blue stripes. These blue stripes should nor­mally turn out white, but here they remained grey­ish, out­lin­ing them­selves against the white coat. And this fact, that blue retained its value, became for me the start­ing point for fur­ther exper­i­ments with colour photo-graphy.

My spec­u­la­tion was cor­rect when i took away the glass-lens, and allowed the light to work directly with­out pass­ing through a medium.

- August Strinderg, from On the Action of Light in Pho­tog­ra­phy — Reflec­tions Occa­sioned by the X-rays

Herta Müller: Secu­ri­tate in all but name

The fact that I was now con­sid­ered a spy because I had refused to become one was worse than the attempt to recruit me and the death threat. I was being slan­dered by pre­cisely the peo­ple that I was pro­tect­ing by refus­ing to spy on them.

Easy bel­lows exten­sion expo­sure com­pen­sa­tion; you need a list + two numbers.

1) The list: F-stops in 1/3 incre­ments, keep this close.

3.5
4
4.5
5
5.6
6.3
7.1
8
9
10
11
13
14
16
18
20
22
25
28
32

2) First num­ber: know the focal length of your lens in inches; divide mm by 25.4 to arrive at the cus­tom­ary unit. Some com­mon con­ver­sions: 90mm=3.5″ 150mm=6″ 210mm=8.26″ 240mm=9.4″ 300mm=11.8″ Locate this num­ber on the F-stop list.

3) Sec­ond num­ber: mea­sure the bel­lows exten­sion in inches from the cen­ter of the lens plane to the cen­ter of the film plane. Locate this num­ber on the F-stop list.

Method: total the num­ber of 1/3 stop dif­fer­ences between the focal length and the bel­lows exten­sion and that will be the approx­i­mate increase in expo­sure required.

Exam­ple: 150mm/6″ lens is about 6.3 on the F-stop list with a bel­lows exten­sion of 9 inches counts 1 full stop of added expo­sure. Another: 210mm/8.26″ lens is 8 on the F-stop list with a bel­lows exten­sion of 10″ equals 2/3 stop increase in exposure.

Fail­ure

directed by Patrick Wilkinson

Light­ning

a video by Paul and Mar­lene Kos

Notes and Quotes from a sum­mer workshop

Fred­er­ick Som­mer by way of Char­lie Weatherby

Fear of Writing

an expur­ga­tion by Jacques Derrida

sun­day trails above hid­den val­ley yel­low springs ohio

Since I’ve been singing the praises of pho­tog­ra­phy, obvi­ously as being a bet­ter state of affairs, I am really telling you that sen­si­tized sur­faces can’t do wrong. To make a draw­ing you have to whip your­self up to a frenzy to get started at all. And you have to do this even if you are going to make a bad draw­ing. But with a cam­era, if you are not care­ful, you might just have it focused prop­erly. You press a but­ton and you’re bound to get some­where with it, unless your meter was ter­ri­bly wrong. So I have over the years begun to feel that the so-called per­sonal ways of impos­ing your­self upon one’s own feel­ings are not less good; they are just harder, they take a hell of a lot more out of you. You paint. You stretch a big can­vas. You make a few moves. You say, “Aw gee, it’s not really all it should be.” You can, in a way, kill your­self over it. What I like about pho­tog­ra­phy is that it is episodic. Bang! Bang! Bang! There is noth­ing wrong with this as long as you don’t go on click­ing! The impor­tant point is that it is con­ge­nial to me to work with some­thing that keeps track of itself. I don’t have to look at an image; I know that an image makes another good image. Nature is out there; the cam­era is in between. If you’re just a mid­wife, this thing comes about. It is less the I. I find that pho­tog­ra­phy is ter­ri­bly reward­ing because I real­ize that I am mostly the bystander in prac­tic­ing art. What I am really get­ting into is the world of aes­thet­ics, and aes­thet­ics is the gen­er­al­ized con­di­tion of art. Art is the con­di­tion that you and I bring about. If we are artists and make a few good moves, maybe this is art. But we can­not make aes­thet­ics. Here is the pecu­liar phe­nom­e­non: these deadly machines, which every­one knows have no feel­ing, can be feel­ingly taken into our con­cerns. So I’ve been impressed with the real asset, with the real advan­tage, and with the real com­fort that comes with sim­ply accept­ing that cer­tain processes work for me. And they work for me best when I quit mas­ter­mind­ing them.

- Fred­er­ick Som­mer, from An Extem­po­ra­ne­ous Talk at The Art Insti­tute of Chicago, Octo­ber 1970

It’s Only Life : The Feelies

San­dor Ellix Katz
Trace Ram­sey
Granny Miller

Castile soap, scraped fine, and half the quan­tity of very finely pul­ver­ized chalk; wet them up to a paste with strong juice of tobacco; when desired to apply to the eye, drop two or three drops of brandy into the box of paste; then take out a bit of it where the brandy was dropped, equal in size to the fourth of a grain of wheat, to the dis­eased eye; wet it on a bit of glass, and put into the eye with a camel’s hair pencil.

Apply twice daily at first, and from that to only once in two days, for from one to two weeks, will, and has cured wretched bad cases, so says Father Pinkney, of Wayne Co, Michi­gan, who has used it over fifty years, he being over ninety years of age. His only object in giv­ing it an inser­tion here is to do good to his fel­low crea­tures; and also for ani­mals, it being equally applic­a­ble to horses or cattle.

- from Dr. Chase’s recipes; or, Infor­ma­tion for every­body: an invalu­able col­lec­tion of about eight hun­dred prac­ti­cal recipes

sasquatch
hunters

That, that worlds inside my walls, that worlds will shriek inside my walls,

worlds of cities, of cities like a sea, a sea not of peo­ple but of stars,

a sea of song, a song strain­ing the sky, strain­ing it on syl­la­bles of pride,

 

through lights new as the spring­time lit up by fashion,

and that I don’t see the hands to which I opened my doors

and that I don’t see the minds into which I lay my worlds

and that, and that, that I am not amongst you.

 

I adored paths by which a mist of gold enters the city amid tar­nished rainbows,

I adored days so close that if they had no dusk, she would have no tomorrow,

 

I adored sated evenings, robust nights, and love which doesn’t poi­son you,

I adored pages of unknown beauty

held in hands, shock­ing young eyes,

I adored the pro­pellers of ques­tions and short answers born on the go,

I adored the holy infan­tophagy of the spirit:

I adored every crea­ture with which the world is enriched, not cluttered,

I adored every great­ness unfold­ing in a yawn­ing lap,

I adored, adored, it didn’t change a thing.

The walls remained firm, so the fruits rot.

 

But, after all, I spoke so clearly that every pear could catch flame!

my sen­tences, which some­times were as crooked as a carpenter’s thumbs,

since, when I crookedly seized the tree of mat­ter, fruits, branches, and leaves found their way into my sen­tences too,

and every strump, touched by me, said as much as it meant.

But for you my act crum­bled, like a nut crushed too hard,

but know: the faults in my work are most fragile

when they orig­i­nate in you.

Your sky, not mine, shrouds me in dread.

To believe in my words, it’s enough for me to look at the clock,

to think, enough to defend myself,

but to act, I need cities in which a spark feeds on that fat of praise,

and where there are those who would dream what I dream like me.

 

So I regret

that I don’t see the minds for whom I opened a door

and that I don’t see the hands in which I lay my worlds

and that, and that, that from my dreams I won’t make our dreams,

I, I the mayor, I the mayor of home­less dreams.

 

- Tadeusz Peiper, 1972

a recita­tion : Leonard Cohen, live in Lon­don 2008

Chap­ter One: Even Dogs Get Neurotic

It doesn’t help. Something’s got to be done. His jaw dropped, his fore­head wrin­kled, he gasped, and then went into a parox­ysm of cough­ing. He coughed and weezed in a man­ner almost sick­en­ing to behold. You know how sen­si­tive I am — there is no limit to the num­ber of symp­toms that can be called forth under those cir­cum­stances — even to sat­isfy a doctor’s curios­ity. Secrete, secrete: saliva gushes, your mouth waters, sali­vary glands go to work. Your brain is only aware of printed words — that is your con­di­tioned reflex — traces of printer’s ink. He got that way in child­hood. From learn­ing to spit when­ever he was angry or crossed or wor­ried. He decided to for­get entirely. In fact he had com­pletely for­got­ten what makes you go to work, punch the clock, lunch at noon, dine heav­ily at night, and wish you hadn’t by bed­time. He did not like to admit these things, even to him­self. He knew it was silly to feel as he does, but he can­not help it. His intestines, his glands, his heart — you could see this for your­self if you had an x-ray machine — the sali­vary responses, the fear responses, includ­ing spams of the stom­ach, cow­er­ing, ten­sion of the mus­cles, the cramp­ing of his intestines, and the dry­ness of his mouth. His whole body sub­sti­tuted. He was no longer human. He was highly irri­ta­ble, snapped at everyone.

It shouldn’t hap­pen, he never knows where he stands. We feel our glands, our stom­achs, intestines, blood ves­sels. All we know is that in a chance encounter pre­des­ti­na­tion wins this exter­nal con­flict between fear, love and hate — and he hasn’t looked far beneath the sur­face of things. This too is being over­done. All this is com­mon knowl­edge. whether he is accepted or rejected, each deter­mined by the angle of approach, each of which is appro­pri­ate, that it’s often dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile one with another. But he knows he isn’t a mar­tyr. Emo­tional habit is at once so com­plex, so diverse, and so closely knit­ted together; coax­ing the sleep that does not come there arises a sense of strain, a lack of fulfillment.

Per­haps you had a trade skill that has been replaced by an auto­matic machine. This lop­ping off of an activ­ity is a com­mon thing in life. You haven’t any­thing else to do, noth­ing to do except to plan another futile, empty day. They gave him a farewell din­ner and a gold watch. You can instruct the blood ves­sels of your face to dilate, but they won’t listen.

*text appor­tioned from a self help book by Dr. Fink, pub­lished 1943 

Every­one car­ries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hear­ing. If some­one walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and lis­tens, say in the night, when every­thing round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rat­tling of a mir­ror not quite firmly fas­tened to the wall.

- Franz Kafka, from Blue Octavo Notebooks

dark­room portraits

a flickr group that makes for a fine slide show

last one out, please turn on the light

a pho­to­graphic sur­vey of London’s remain­ing pro­fes­sional dark­rooms by Richard Nicholson

ninety-hours in darkness

Mag­num printer Pablo Inirio writes about his expe­ri­ences with Ann Tornkvist

against ease: or how the infi­nitely repro­ducible pushes us fur­ther from the source

an essay by Michael David Murphy

dark­room portraits

a long thread at the Ana­log Pho­tog­ra­phy Users Group

dark­room ● cham­bre noir

pho­tographs by Michel Campeau

Use the B3 cus­tom work flow; this will help assure color and den­sity con­sis­tency from book to book. Also you will be able to see a very close soft proof on your mon­i­tor of what your printed images will look like. You need to have a color cal­i­brated mon­i­tor for B3.

Use the pre­mium paper; it is thicker and brighter white. This makes for a more bril­liant image with clean highlights.

Con­vert your images to the sRGB color space. Also resize your images at 300ppi to the size require­ments of the lay­out [remem­ber to use “bicu­bic sharper” in Pho­to­shop image size dia­log box if reduc­ing] and save in RGB mode as a jpg at the high­est qual­ity set­ting. Should you leave it to Blurb to con­vert the color space and resize your images, you lose control.

For mono­chrome images I rec­om­mend using a duo­tone pre­set from Pho­to­shop. I’ve read com­plaints that it can be dif­fi­cult to obtain a neu­tral grey image from Blurb’s printer. With a duo­tone, though the color might sub­tly shift from screen to print, it will present far less of a prob­lem than a slightly magenta or green tinted neu­tral grey would. Also a duo­tone will lend a pleas­ing dimen­sion­al­ity to your images.

Blurb’s printer ren­ders mid-­tones and high­lights beau­ti­fully, but tends to block and muddy the shad­ows. Also, due to the dif­fer­ence between sub­trac­tive color [ink] and addi­tive color [mon­i­tor], images often look darker when printed than they appear on screen. Its likely your first book will look too dark as mine did.

I was uncer­tain how much to lighten my images, so for the sec­ond attempt I sim­ply light­ened all the pho­tographs by 10% using the “lighter” pre­set from the drop down menu in Photoshop’s curves dia­log box. I knew this was going to be too light — but that’s ok. Between the too dark first proof, and the too light sec­ond proof, I had two known con­trol points — 10% apart — with which to more accu­rately judge the cor­rect den­sity for opti­mum shadows.

For the third proof I indi­vid­u­ally adjusted the den­sity of each image to where I felt it should be between the too dark and too light proofs, mak­ing care­ful note of the curve data. When I received this book, it was very near accept­able. Fol­low­ing my curve notes for each, I re-adjusted the den­sity of about a third of the images; very slight incre­ments were needed at this point, just 1% or 1.5% up or down to open up a shadow or bring back a lit­tle mys­tery, as well as to bal­ance the lay­out as a whole.

If I were to make another book I’d use the same process, but print the too dark and too light images in one large book, to save time and money.

For you dark­room print­ers, you might rec­og­nize my strat­egy as not unlike zero­ing in the cor­rect den­sity by using test prints. Michael A. Smith’s out­flank­ing the print is my guide.

Deliver Me : a haunt­ing song by Robin Holcomb

sup­pose pick­led eggs are out of fash­ion and there’s a lot of vari­a­tion, but these are the eas­i­est i know. boil a dozen good eggs, peel, and set in a clean half gal­lon jar. slice up a big sweet onion and top the eggs; sliced gar­lic is good too. let boil a minute two cups apple cider vine­gar, one cup water, a table­spoon salt, two table­spoons brown sugar, a heap­ing tea­spoon each black pep­per­corns and mus­tard seed, and two or three bay leaves. pour the mix hot over the eggs and onions, seal the jar, and let leave in the refrig­er­a­tor. ready in a day or two; later is bet­ter: three months is good. fine with beer. might use the brine in dress­ing and the pick­led onions cut nice for tuna salad.

May 14, 1929: Can I ever for­get cer­tain days, peri­ods, places? One of the ear­li­est, — the scene in a Chicago apart­ment, print­ing from my first neg­a­tive made with a stand cam­era pur­chased with money saved penny by penny, walk­ing ten miles to save ten cents, deny­ing sweets, sell­ing rags and bot­tles: a second-hand cam­era I had seen in a down­town win­dow, with tri­pod and fil­ter it cost $11. I can even recall the ecsta­tic cry as the print devel­oped out — “It’s a peach!” — and how I ran, trem­bling with excite­ment, to my father’s library to show this snow-scene made in Wash­ing­ton Park, — a tree, a wind­ing stream, snow cov­ered banks. I slipped into the stream and rode home on the Cot­tage Grove cable car with my trouser legs frozen stiff as a board.

My enthu­si­asm over this print did not last long: I soon real­ized that the tree was too black, the snow too white, and my strug­gle began, caused by dis­sat­is­fac­tion, to improve my tech­nique, — a long, tough strug­gle with­out help, for I was a bash­ful boy, dread­ing to hear my own voice when mak­ing pur­chases, — to ask ques­tions would have been impossible.

- from The Day­books of Edward Henry Weston

The Robert Frank Col­or­ing Book

a visual analy­sis of The Amer­i­cans by Jno Cook

Robert Frank’s America

from After­Im­age, 1982 by Jno Cook

Robert Frank: Dis­sect­ing the Amer­i­can Image

from Expo­sure, 1985 by Jno Cook

Robert Frank’s Unsen­ti­men­tal Journey

from Van­ity Fair, 2008 by Char­lie LeDuff

Road Show: The Jour­ney of Robert Frank’s Americans

from New Yorker, 2009 by Anthony Lane

sat­ur­day by the river hid­den val­ley yel­low springs ohio

an open work­top, a site of man­u­fac­ture, an accumulation

ten years old today

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fin­gers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy fig­ures half the night
Among the trees that face the cor­ner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For some­thing is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

- Theodor­eRoethke, from The Col­lected Poems of Theodore Roethke

rain footage
by Veron­ica Ibarra

an unti­tled film
by Ing­mar Lemmens

care and feed­ing of a mer­maid
State Library and Archives of Florida’s photostream

16 polaroids

Back in high school I had a griz­zled shell of a his­tory teacher twenty years past believ­ing he could teach apa­thetic teenagers any­thing. Most days, rather than explain­ing the course of North Amer­i­can events since 1776, he pro­jected dust crack­led black and white films of maligned rene­gade anthro­pol­o­gist Thor Hey­er­dahl sto­ically sail­ing across the Pacific Ocean in the flim­si­est of ves­sels, prov­ing that First Peo­ples had the means to travel fur­ther, faster and much ear­lier than smug euro­centrics thought possible.

The few times he did lec­ture — whether it was about slav­ery, native rights, women’s suf­frage, the Indus­trial Work­ers of the World, or the red scare — there was always the same two endur­ing themes. The first was to reit­er­ate that the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence only puts forth the right of peo­ple to pur­sue hap­pi­ness, and that nowhere does it say that any­one attains hap­pi­ness. The sec­ond point was to drive home the core feel­ing of those on the los­ing side of human events. As the clock approached the end of the period, the ring­ing of the class bell immi­nent, and the nar­ra­tive hav­ing exhausted its por­tent, he would tighten his fists into angry balls, his face would flush red with the enmity and injus­tice of those who believed them­selves wronged, and he would wail as loud as he could, over and over again like a demented fear­ful siren, “IT’S NOT FAIR! IT’S NOT FAIR! IT’S NOT FAIR!” This dis­play we were to under­stand as not only the cen­tral motif of his­tory, but as the essen­tial build­ing block of life.

I used to think Mr. K. was a burned out cynic who should’ve retired long before I entered his class­room. Twenty years on, hav­ing done some nav­i­gat­ing of my own, I can only view his antics as a real­is­tic sum­ma­tion of the sit­u­a­tion. Maneu­ver­ing daily through an increas­ingly global cul­ture of cap­i­tal bent on mea­sur­ing suc­cess by mate­r­ial own­er­ship, rel­a­tive worth and fame, I am frus­trated. Ide­alisms of this sort are by neces­sity exclu­sive. In our con­stant strug­gle to move for­ward, to achieve more, to rise higher, to be the best, to even­tu­ally be the only one, I won­der how, at what point, can a per­son tell, if ever, that they are set­tled: that they have what they want, that they are com­fort­able in their own skin.

i’m curat­ing La Pura Vida for Sep­tem­ber 2009 — theme: “drift­ing in deep waters”

“Men adrift, espe­cially in north­ern lat­i­tudes, some­times imag­ine they can see things which are not there, such as smoke, sails, ships or land. This is a form of mirage, the same phe­nom­e­non that occurs in the desert, and if you expe­ri­ence it, it does not mean that you are out of your mind or even light-headed.”

– Office of Naval Intel­li­gence, from Sur­vival on Land and Sea, 1943

Deep Water : Portishead

I’m drift­ing in deep waters
alone with my self doubt­ing again
I try not to strug­gle this time
for I will weather the storm
I gotta remem­ber
don’t fight it
even if I
don’t like it
some­how turn me around
no mat­ter how far I drift
deep waters won’t scare me tonight

sub­mis­sions open via flickr

fri­day along the bike path spring­field ohio

Fresser. com­piled by Kevin Slavin:

In a piece for De Mor­gen (sat­ur­day july 4) Dou­glas de Con­ick writes about the five pirates from Soma­lia who are on trial now in Hol­land for try­ing to hijack the freighter Samany­olu. Willem-Jan Ausma is the lay­wer of the youngest one, Yusuf Ahmed (24). Yusuf is now in jail at Alphen aan de Rijn and they talk through an inter­preter. He is so happy! When Willem told him he would try to bring the nine years sen­tence to four he asked why? He enjoys him­self tremen­dously in jail. He gets food, can do sports and wants to learn Dutch and bring over his fam­ily asap. Willem– Jan relates how Yusuf was fish­ing for lob­ster only a few years ago, mak­ing enough money to sup­port his fam­ily. Then the Euro­pean and Asian trawlers came, got all the fish and wrecked the bot­tom of the ocean with their huge nets. No more fish, no more work. You know, the lay­wer says, I know these sto­ries from the papers but when you hear a guy like that tell it it becomes a dif­fer­ent story. And after the fish was gone, other ships came. They dumped chem­i­cals and waste. And now Yusuf is in jail in a place that has prof­ited for all that destruc­tion and is feel­ing happy. — happy

riley dog

Wait : a song by Lewis Allen Reed

Wait (dis­grace)
I know I shouldn’t, but we’ll wait (such a pretty face)
I know the time is get­ting late (i mean such a waste)
And here is what you hes­i­tate (of such a pretty face)
But still I really wish that you’d wait (really such a waste)
Although the pas­sion might abate (such a pretty face)
And find you in another state (it was such a dis­grace)
That will seem just as a mis­take (it was such a waste)
Oh baby, I really think I oughta wait (of such a pretty face)

Wait (it was such a waste)
I really wouldn’t want your hate (of such a pretty face)
Cer­tainly not after like late (and it was such a waste)
You wanna give not only take (of such a pretty face)
I know pro­pri­ety is such a waste (it was such a dis­grace)
But then it says you really have to wait (such a pretty face)
Con­sid­er­ing the present state (i mean such a waste)
Don’t change my mind at such a late stage ( …such a waste)
Oh baby, don’t you think you oughta wait (of such a pretty face)

Ooohhh …
Ooohhh …
Ooohhh …
Ooohhh …

Wait
Oh, now baby, how I wish you’d wait
I really wish you’d hes­i­tate
Oh, baby, baby please why don’t you wait
Oh, how I really wish that you would wait
Oh, how I wish you’d hes­i­tate
Oh bet­ter late then never, baby wait
baby how i wish that you’d wait
…
…

(… some­day)

There are large areas in the trop­ics which are only sparsely cov­ered with veg­e­ta­tion con­sist­ing for the most part of grasses and a few scat­tered trees. Some of these areas are the result of the destruc­tion of the orig­i­nal veg­e­ta­tion by cul­ti­va­tion or by fires. These are often quite dry. Var­i­ous grasses are found in these open spaces and as there are no poi­so­nous grasses, any that are found may be eaten with­out dan­ger. In fact, most of man’s cul­ti­vated food comes from grasses such as wheat, rye, corn, sug­ar­cane, etc. Real grasses can be rec­og­nized by their jointed stems, such as in corn­stalk, and by their char­ac­ter­is­tic flow­ers which are never con­spic­u­ously col­ored. Because their seeds fall off read­ily after ripen­ing they are gen­er­ally dif­fi­cult to gather. Also their seeds usu­ally need to be ground into some kind of flour and cooked before being eaten. One form of grass, how­ever, has fairly large, usu­ally white and shiny, bread­like “fruits” called Job’s Tears. These con­tain sev­eral seeds that can be eaten either boiled or roasted. This plant is some­times cultivated.

A small tree — up to 20 feet in height — that grows in open and waste places, as well as in cul­ti­vated fields, in the Old World is the horse­rad­ish tree. The leaves, shoots, and young pods of this tree may be eaten raw, or when cooked as greens. The seeds may be roasted. The roots of the tree taste like horseradish.

- from Sur­vival on Land and Sea, Office of Naval Intel­li­gence, The United States Navy, 1943

INTERVIEW PROJECT

peo­ple found along the way across amer­ica talk straight about their lives; even though each inter­view is only a few min­utes long the faces and sto­ries will stay with you.

Car­rier

fas­ci­nat­ing ten part PBS doc­u­men­tary about day to day life aboard the USS Nimitz; car­ry­ing nearly 5,800 peo­ple the ship is a float­ing hive of activ­ity. fol­low the lives of var­i­ous crew mem­bers, many of them star­tlingly young, through the chal­lenges and stress of a six month deploy­ment to Iraq and back.

a soft work­ing print developer

Devel­oper Stock Solu­tion
750 ml water (125 degrees F)
2.2 gr metol
35 gr sodium sul­fite (anhy­drous)
78 gr sodium car­bon­ate (mono­hy­drated)
11 gr glycin
+ water to make 1000 ml

Mix chem­i­cals in order given; begin with a pinch of sodium sul­fite to min­i­mize oxi­da­tion of the metol.

Use diluted 1:2. Activ­ity will be slow, with a devel­op­ing time between two and eight min­utes. Pro­vides bril­liant slightly warm tonal­ity with excel­lent sep­a­ra­tion of mid­dle and high­light val­ues. Over time work­ing solu­tion will darken quite brown, but main­tains an exceed­ingly long tray life.

Work­ing strength devel­oper may be fur­ther adjusted with the fol­low­ing two solutions:

10% KBr Solu­tion
1000 ml water
100 gr potas­sium bromide

Use to pre­vent fog; add 10-25ml/liter as needed to work­ing solu­tion of developer.

Hydro­quinone Solu­tion
750 ml water (125 degrees F)
25 gr sodium sul­fite
10 gr hydro­quinone
+ water to make 1000 ml

Use to boost print con­trast; add as required to work­ing solu­tion of devel­oper. Will cool slightly image tone.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lucy

Manuel Alvarez Bravo and I walk across the court­yard to the dark­room, maneu­ver­ing around bulky, expen­sive equip­ment that has been draped and pushed to the cor­ners, unused. Slowly, he makes his way past the tin kitchen cups and eighteenth-century irons that have replaced pre­cise mea­sur­ing tools and elec­tri­cal paper presses. A bed of tinted glass mar­bles sits con­spic­u­ously in the sink. Chem­i­cals in hand, he turns his picaro eyes toward me. “Ari­adne, after we work on these neg­a­tives, maybe you could accom­pany me to the photo shop. I like to ask them for things I know they don’t have. That way we keep them enter­tained, no?”

- Ari­adne Kim­berly Huque, diary excerpt Jan­u­ary 11, 1989